Applied Mathematics

Speaker: Fernando Guevara Vasquez, University of Utah

Title: Manipulation of particles in a fluid with standing acoustic waves

Date: 04/12/2019

Time: 4:10 PM - 5:00 PM

Place: C304 Wells Hall

Consider a collection of particles in a fluid that is subject to
a standing acoustic wave. In some situations, the particles tend to
cluster about the nodes of the wave. We study the problem of finding a
standing acoustic wave that can position particles in desired locations,
i.e. whose nodal set is as close as possible to desired curves or
surfaces. We show that in certain situations we can expect to reproduce
patterns up to the diffraction limit. For periodic particle patterns, we
show that there are limitations on the unit cell and that the possible
patterns in dimension d can be determined from an eigendecomposition of a
2d x 2d matrix.